It is well-known that drought has considerable effects on plant traits from leaf to ecosystem scales; however, little is known about the relative contributions of various traits within or between tree species in determining the plant's sensitivity or the tolerance to drought under field conditions. We conducted a field throughfall exclusion experiment to simulate short-term drought (∼67% throug...

Cotton is one of the most important crops for its natural textile fibers in the world. However, it often suffered from drought stress during its growth and development, resulting in a drastic reduction in cotton productivity. Therefore, study on molecular mechanism of cotton drought-tolerance is very important for increasing cotton production. To investigate molecular mechanism of cotton drough...

Different drought indices often provide different diagnoses of drought severity, making it difficult to determine the best way to evaluate these different drought monitoring results. Additionally, the ability of a newly proposed drought index, the Process-based Accumulated Drought Index (PADI) has not yet been tested in United States. In this study, we quantified the severity of 2012 drought wh...

Droughts can influence forest composition directly by limiting water or indirectly by intensifying other stressors that affect establishment, growth, and mortality. Using community assemblages of eastern US tree species and drought tolerance characteristics assessed from literature, we examine recent drought conditions in relation to the spatial distribution of species and their tolerance to dr...

In recent years, global climate change has altered precipitation patterns, causing uneven spatial and temporal distribution of precipitation that gradually induces precipitation polarization phenomena. Taiwan is located in the subtropical climate zone, with distinct wet and dry seasons, which makes the polarization phenomenon more obvious; this has also led to a large difference between river f...

Drought stress is a common adverse environmental condition that seriously affects crop productivity worldwide. Due to the complexity of drought as a stress signal, deciphering drought tolerance mechanisms has remained a major challenge to plant biologists. To develop new approaches to study plant drought tolerance, we searched for phenotypes conferred by drought stress and identified the inhibi...

Drought frequency and intensity has been predicted to increase under many climate change scenarios. It is therefore critical to understand the response of forests to potential climate change in an effort to mitigate adverse impacts. The purpose of this study was to explore the regional effects of different drought severities on tree growth and mortality. Specifically, we investigated changes in...

Water managers are tasked with resolving conflicts between freshwater resource uses, which range from municipal water supply, to recreation, and to sustaining aquatic ecosystem integrity. Further complicating management, hydrologic processes experience numerous sources of periodic, quasi-periodic, and episodic variation. Water allocation trade offs are often most complex and contentious when av...

Diversity in seedling responses to combined shade and drought can drive species niche differences, and thus natural forest and scrub establishment dynamics and diversity. However, inherent trade-offs between shade tolerance and drought tolerance, as hypothesized in the literature, would constrain potential niche differentiation. For thirteen species of European trees and shrubs the impacts were...

Flowering time and water-use efficiency (WUE) are two ecological traits that are important for plant drought response. To understand the evolutionary significance of natural genetic variation in flowering time, WUE, and WUE plasticity to drought in Arabidopsis thaliana, we addressed the following questions: (1) How are ecophysiological traits genetically correlated within and between different ...